Greetings, everyone from finally sunny again Central Florida! Tropical storm Fay has finally moved on and I am starting to dry out a little bit. So, that being said I just read an interesting article from Marlon Sanders that discusses the steps you need to take in order to set up your sales machine. It contains a ton of great information about setting up your sales machines so I thought that I would pass it on. Read Marlons article below:

The 6 Parts Of A Sales Machine That Won’t Quit

By Marlon Sanders

Let’s talk about you and your sales machine. 

You get people into your funnel. You send ‘em emails and sales messages. Take ‘em FROM those emails to “conversion pieces” and you sell ‘em. Or give ‘em reasons to buy now.

Whatever you wanna call it.

I’ve tried hard over the past 6 months to convince you to create  your own products. Whether you have or haven’t, it’s now time you  move on and learn to build your list and your sales machine. If you  don’t have your own product by now, just get started using affiliate products.

Here are the 6 steps to building your sales machine.

1.  Research your target market to know the blogs, forums, and web sites your target audience visits.

You want to look at the signature lines in forums to find out who is
selling what to whom. 

You want to find out WHO the list owners are because they’re your
potential joint venture partners. In other words, they’re the ones
who might sell your product to their list for a commission on sales.

You want to look at the blogs and forums and find out if there are
Google Ads on the page (if so, you can buy an ad on that exact page
using Google’s site targeting and pay ONLY when someone clicks).

You want to see if you can purchase banners there and so forth. You
want to write up an in depth profile of your ideal buyer, including
their age, income, educational level and web sites they frequent.

2.  Create a hot freebie that’ll compel ‘em to join your email list.

In Internet marketing the past 6 months, highly sophisticated  product launches have taken over that involve videos or other things being given away in exchange for an email address. 

The formula is STILL the same:

Get people on your email list and sell ‘em. Only on product launches, you do the selling part in a collapsed time frame like a day or a week buttressed by the social support of all your buddies
(or allies) emailing the same offer at the same time.

The ART of the product launch that a few people have mastered is how to get all their buddies and affiliates to email for THEM without having to do reciprocal emails for all of them.

In most target markets, you won’t have that problem. In Internet marketing it’s an issue because everyone is obviously a marketer and has their own thing to pitch.

Anyway, the point is, you wanna find something really hot that’ll make people WANT to join your email list and confirm their email.

3.  A Squeeze page and email thank you/confirmation process that is a well-oiled machine.

Once people join your list, they go to a thank you page. You usually use that page to convince people to go to their email and click the confirmation link. Then after they click THAT link, you
take them to a special offer.

In modern terminology, it’s an OTO. In truth, it’s nothing different than what has been done for 1,000 years. A special offer with a time limit.

Don’t you know that 1,000 years ago the big marketing trick was to sell your camel by throwing in the mule but only if you bought that day?

One thing that HAS changed is the format of the pitch. There is some evidence things are going more to video pitches vs. text, although I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that with my target market.

I still like sales letters as the primary tool supported by audio and video.

4.  Email that gets delivered.

You need a reliable email service and a way to monitor delivery. I get stats on my email delivery. I average about 75%. But sometimes it’ll go up to 95%.

The problem with cheaper services is you probably won’t get as good of delivery as you get with more expensive services. But the service itself costs quite a bit more.

5. Regular emails to your list that pitch and give value.

You need to have a ratio between pitches and content or value if possible. I didn’t used to do this. But in today’s market, I feel it’s important, although debatable.

If you have a situation where tons of affiliates will go to bat for your product launch, your own list doesn’t matter much. 

I’m doing this ezine because I feel the content helps people stay on my list and retains readership. I’m one of the ONLY (if not the only) major brand name teachers doing this.

6.  Send people to your blog, mp3 audios (podcasts), videos, live video, recorded video, screen capture video and other sales tools.

If your people aren’t BUYING, employ “The Full Arsenal.” Send ‘em links to something that does a more in depth sales job than the email can like audio or video.

You do NOT HAVE to use “The Full Arsenal.” Some people don’t like audio or video. I encourage you to use it. But you can succeed without it.

Here’s a little mini checklist for implementing “The Full Arsenal.“

– How to record audio, edit it, add a nice little music track to the beginning, sweeten the sound and turn it into nice flash buttons for your web site, this is a skill worth learning.

– On video, you should know the basics of 3-point lighting.  And be able to convert video to FLV. That’s a minimum skill. Yes, you can farm out some of it. But it isn’t all that complicated to learn.

– You need to know how to use Camtasia or Camstudio to record screen video and save it to a SMALL file size, so it’ll stream right on your web site.

– You need to know how to use Power Point or the Presentation software in free Open Office to create slides you record with Camtasia.

– And I think knowing how to create cool backgrounds is a plus.

– You should be able to put audio and video on your blog.

On video, the LIGHTING makes ALL the difference in the world.  Knowing the basics of lighting really helps. And on screen video, having decent audio helps.

The minimum learning curve would be doing SCREEN video and audio podcasts. Those two are ESSENTIAL in this business.

I’ll add that I teach everything above in the New Promo Dashboard, although the part on lighting isn’t complete. I refer you to a  $30 DVD you really need to buy to learn to do lighting right, although there  are some decent tutorials for it on Youtube.

But this isn’t a pitch. These are the things you need to know and do. They aren’t sexy but they ARE the guts of the business.

In 30 minutes to 2 hours a day, you can make a real dent in learning these skills.

But the most crucial ones are everything down to row 6 “The Full Arsenal.” You can add those skills as you go along.

But you gotta know where and how to REACH your target audience, how to put together a freebie that attracts ‘em, how to put up the Squeeze page and how to send out emails that get ‘em to buy!

This is ALL the “gurus” do. Except they get all their friends to promote on the same day or week. But the process is exactly the same.

So let me ask you a question: WHERE are you on these 6 steps?
Where are you STUCK at?

What will it take for you to get to the NEXT step? To get unstuck?
Post that to my blog if you want a response from me.

http://www.marlonsnews.com

Best wishes,

Marlon Sanders

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Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Info Product Dashboard.”
If you want to create your own info products, Click Here
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I hope you enjoyed Marlons article. He always has an interesting way of making his point. Be sure and leave your comments about Marlons Sales Machine article.

I’ll talk to you again soon,
Steve